Cisco

The best reason to work at Cisco is the intelligence and diversity of the people. My experience is that everyone respects other cultures and forms strong teams.

In addition, flex time and telecommuting are important (unless you are unfortunate enough to have a VP who wants to fire all telecommuters). These privileges are enabled by our technology.

Also, the technology itself is fascinating. We use our products in our work. It's very exciting meeting people from around the world via telepresence, for example. I look forward to using other collaboration tools that Cisco has acquired in the past year or so.

The compensation system is manipulated every year so as to lower the bonuses paid out, regardless of company performance. It's sad to see your income decreasing, even though you are a good or excellent performer.

In addition, the ranking system is poorly administered, with pools for ranking of under 30 people, or even fewer. Strong teams are punished every year because of this unfair practice.

Human Resources and other groups at Cisco strive to present this system in a positive way, but everyone hates it. It's very demoralizing and adds to work stress.

Also, there are few standards for judging management effectiveness. No one looks at attrition or leaves of absences in a manager's group, for example. Actually being an exceptional manager with an exceptional team is greeted with skepticism, as though 10 people, for example, really always fall on the Bell curve.

In my part of Cisco, I see an alarming rate of attrition, with many going to competitor companies. Management needs to acknowledge the cost of replacing these people, and it needs to act soon to respond to employees' needs. Compensation is below many competitors', and Cisco arrogantly asserts that the prestige of the company is sufficient to attract and keep people. Cisco falls well behind other companies in benefits as well, and it will be hard to hire people from such companies as Microsoft.